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On this day: September 26

2010: Actress Gloria Stuart, best known for her Academy Award-nominated role in "Titanic," dies of respiratory failure at age 100 in Los Angeles, California. Her career in Hollywood spanned from the 1930s until 2004, with a long break in the middle. She played Claude Rains' sweetheart in 1933's "The Invisible Man" and appeared in movies like "Here Comes the Navy," "Gold Diggers of 1935," "Poor Little Rich Girl" and "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm." Her Oscar nomination for "Titanic" made her the oldest person to be nominated for a competitive Oscar, at the age of 87.

2009: Director Roman Polanski is arrested in Zurich, Switzerland, on a warrant related to charges of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in the U.S. in the 1970s. Polanski would be kept in jail near Zurich for two months, then put under house arrest at his home in Gstaad, Switzerland, while awaiting decision of appeals fighting extradition to America. On July 12, 2010, the Swiss would reject the U.S. request, declaring Polanski a "free man" and releasing him from custody.

2008: Swiss pilot and inventor Yves Rossy becomes the first person to fly a jet engine-powered wing across the English Channel, completing the trip in nine minutes and seven seconds and reaching a top speed of 186 mph.

2008: Legendary actor Paul Newman, who was nominated for an Oscar eight times and won for 1986's "The Color of Money," dies from lung cancer at the age of 83 in Westport, Connecticut. Some of his other best known films include "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "The Hustler," "Cool Hand Luke," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Sting" and "Slap Shot." Newman was also known for co-founding Newman's Own, a food company from which he donated all post-tax profits and royalties to charity, and as an auto racing enthusiast who raced cars himself and owned his own racing team.

2006: Professional golfer Byron Nelson, mostly remembered today for having won 11 consecutive tournaments and 18 total tournaments in 1945, dies at age 94 in Roanoke, Texas. Nelson collected 64 career victories, including 52 on the PGA Tour, before retiring at the age of 34 in 1946 to be a rancher. Among his victories are two Masters titles, a U.S. Open win, and two PGA Championships.

2006: "The Departed," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg and Martin Sheen, and directed by Martin Scorsese, premieres in New York City. The crime thriller, a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film "Infernal Affairs," became the first remake to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and also captured Oscars for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing. The win for Scorsese was the first Oscar he received after previously losing out on nominations for "Raging Bull," "The Last Temptation of Christ," "Goodfellas," "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator."

2003: Singer-songwriter Robert Palmer, best known for his hits "Simply Irresistible" and "Addicted to Love" and their iconic videos featuring a bevy of near-identically clad, heavily made-up female "musicians," dies from a heart attack at the age of 54 in Paris, France.

1986: The comedy "Crocodile Dundee" premieres in theaters. The movie, starring Paul Hogan as the title character, proved to be a worldwide phenomenon, earning $328 million worldwide after being made on a budget of less than $10 million. It would end up being the No. 2 box office movie of the year both in the U.S. and worldwide and spawned two sequels.

1986: William H. Rehnquist is sworn in as the 16th chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, while Antonin Scalia joins the court as an associate justice.

1984: Prince releases his song "Purple Rain" as a single. The song, which would reach No. 2 in the United States, comes from the movie and album of the same name and is widely considered one of the singer's signature hits.

1981: Nolan Ryan of the Houston Astros throws the fifth no-hitter of his career, breaking Sandy Koufax's mark while becoming only the third pitcher to throw a no-hitter in each league. He would add two more for a total of seven non-hitters in his career before retiring in 1993.

1981: Tennis player Serena Williams, who has won 33 grand slam titles (18 in singles, 13 in women's doubles, and two in mixed doubles) and has been ranked No. 1 in singles on six separate occasions in her career, is born in Saginaw, Michigan. Williams, the younger sister of fellow tennis star Venus Williams, became the World No. 1 for the first time on July 8, 2002, and regained the ranking for the sixth time on Feb. 18, 2013, becoming, at age 31, the oldest No. 1 player in the World Tennis Association's history.

1981: A prototype of the Boeing 767, a mid-size, wide-body twin-engine jet airliner, makes its maiden flight in Everett, Washington.

1977: The experimental space shuttle Enterprise flies on its own for the first time. The prototype was attached to a Boeing 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft and carried to a launch height, before being jettisoned by the use of explosive bolts to glide to a landing on the runways at Edwards Air Force Base. The intention of these flights was to test the flight characteristics of the orbiter itself, on a typical approach and landing profile from orbit.

1975: "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" premieres in theaters. Although the rock musical, starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick and Richard O'Brien, tanked upon its release, it would find second life in midnight, audience participation showings that continue to this day.

1973: The Concorde makes its first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic in record-breaking time, flying from Washington, D.C., to Paris-Orly Airport in France in three hours and 32 minutes.

1969: The album "Abbey Road" by the Beatles is released in the United Kingdom. The album, which features such songs as "Come Together," "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun," would be released in the United States on Oct. 1. The album was named for the London street location of EMI Studios where the album was recorded and features the iconic image of the band crossing Abbey Road's "zebra crossing" near the studio. It was the band's last recorded album, although "Let It Be" was the last album released before the band's breakup in 1970.

1969: The sitcom "The Brady Bunch" premieres on television. The series, which revolved around a large blended family headed by by Robert Reed and Florence Henderson, would run for five seasons before ending on March 8, 1974.

1968: The movie musical "Oliver!" premieres in London, England. Based on the stage musical of the same name, which was based on Charles Dickens' novel "Oliver Twist," the movie would go on to earn 11 Academy Award nominations, winning six, including Oscars for Best Picture, and Best Director for Carol Reed.

1968: Actor Jim Caviezel, best known for movies such as "The Passion of the Christ," "Frequency," "The Count of Monte Cristo," "Déjà Vu" and "The Thin Red Line," is born in Mount Vernon, Washington.

1964: The sitcom "Gilligan's Island," starring Bob Denver, Alan Hale Jr., Jim Backus, Natalie Schafer, Tina Louise, Russell Johnson and Dawn Wells, premieres on television. The show would last only three seasons before ending on Sept. 4, 1967, but would find new life in syndication and become a TV classic.

1962: The sitcom "The Beverly Hillbillies" premieres on television. The show, about a poor backwoods family transplanted to Beverly Hills after striking oil on their land, would run for nine seasons before ending on March 23, 1971.

1960: In Chicago, the first televised debate takes place between presidential candidates. Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy squared off, with Nixon's campaign suffering a blow when he appeared looking pale, sickly, underweight and tired after a recent hospitalization to treat a knee infection. Nixon also refused makeup, and as a result his beard stubble showed prominently on the era's black-and-white TV screens. After the debate, polls showed Kennedy moving from a slight deficit into a slight lead over Nixon.

1957: The play "West Side Story," with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, opens on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre. The production ran for 732 performances before touring and then returning to the Winter Garden Theatre in 1960 for another 253 performance engagement, winning two Tony Awards in the process. It also spawned a 1961 musical film of the same name starring Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris and Russ Tamblyn. The film won 10 Academy Awards out of 11 nominations, including Best Picture.

1956: Actress Linda Hamilton, best known for playing Sarah Connor in "The Terminator" and its sequel "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and Catherine Chandler in the TV series "Beauty and the Beast" (pictured), is born in Salisbury, Maryland.

1955: Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher are married in a simple, short ceremony in Grossinger, New York. The marriage produced a son and a daughter, "Star Wars" actress Carrie Fisher, but ended in divorce in 1959 when Fisher and Reynolds' best friend, fellow actress Elizabeth Taylor, fell in love following the death of Taylor's then-husband Mike Todd.

1948: Singer and actress Olivia Newton-John, best known for her role as Sandy in "Grease" and such songs as "Physical," "Have You Never Been Mellow" and "I Honestly Love You," is born in Cambridge, England.

1925: Singer-songwriter and musician Marty Robbins, one of the most popular and successful country and Western singers of all time, is born in Glendale, Arizona. Some of his best known songs include "A White Sport Coat," "El Paso," "Big Iron" and "Devil Woman." He died at age 57 of complications following cardiac surgery on Dec. 8, 1982.

1918: The Meuse-Argonne Offensive, the bloodiest single battle in American history, begins during World War I. The battle was part of the final Allied offensive of the war that stretched along the entire western front and would last until the Armistice on Nov. 11, 1918. The offensive cost the Americans 117,000 casualties, the French 70,000 and the Germans 100,000. The American casualties represented 40 percent of their total battlefield losses during the war.

1914: The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is established by the Federal Trade Commission Act.

1914: American fitness and nutritional expert Jack LaLanne, who is sometimes called "the godfather of fitness" and the "first fitness superhero," is born under the birth name Francois Henri LaLanne in San Francisco, California. LaLanne, seen here at right in 1960, died of pneumonia at the age of 96 on Jan. 23, 2011.

1902: Levi Strauss, who founded Levi Strauss & Co., the first company to manufacture blue jeans, dies at the age of 73 in San Francisco, California.

1898: Composer George Gershwin, whose best known works include the orchestral compositions "Rhapsody in Blue" and "An American in Paris" as well as the opera "Porgy and Bess," is born in Brooklyn, New York. He died from a brain tumor at age 38 on July 11, 1937.

1888: Writer and poet T. S. Eliot, best known for such poems as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, is born in St. Louis, Missouri. He died of emphysema at the age of 76 on Jan. 4, 1965.

1872: The first Shriners Temple, called Mecca, is established at the New York City Masonic Hall.

1849: Physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate Ivan Pavlov, known primarily for his work in classical conditioning, is born in Ryazan, Russian Empire. Pavlov is most famous for his concept of "conditioned reflex," discovered while examining the rates of salivations among dogs. Pavlov discovered that then when a buzzer, metronome, bell or other stimuli provided to a dog before food, the dog will initially salivate when the food is presented. The dog later came to associate the stimuli with the presentation of the food and salivated upon the presentation of just that stimulus. Pavlov died of double pneumonia at age 86 on Feb. 27, 1936.

1820: American pioneer, explorer, and frontiersman Daniel Boone, whose frontier exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States, dies of natural causes at age 85 in Defiance, Missouri. Boone is most famous for his exploration and settlement of what is now Kentucky.

1789: President George Washington appoints Thomas Jefferson as the first United States secretary of state. He also appointed John Jay as the first chief justice of the United States, Samuel Osgood as the first United States postmaster general and Edmund Randolph as the first United States attorney general.

1774: Environmentalist and pioneer Johnny Appleseed is born under the birth name Jonathan Chapman in Leominster, Massachusetts. Chapman, who would become an American legend while he was still alive, introduced apple trees to large parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

1772: The soon-to-be state of New Jersey passes the first law in the U.S. to license medical practioners, except those who do not charge for their services, or whose activity is bleeding patients or pulling teeth.

1687: The Parthenon in Athens is partially destroyed by an explosion caused by the bombing from Venetian forces led by Francesco Morosini who are besieging the Ottoman Turks stationed in Athens. About 300 people died in the explosion, which showered marble fragments over nearby Turkish defenders and caused large fires that burned until the following day and consumed many homes.

1580: Sir Francis Drake finishes his circumnavigation of the Earth by sailing into Plymouth, England, after nearly three years, with 59 out of 164 remaining crew aboard, along with a rich cargo of spices and captured Spanish treasures.

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